Fastmail here too, and my email address is older than Gmail, and probably older than a significant portion of HN posters. Fastmails spam filter just works. I get a few false negatives per month, and some months zero. I've set it to /dev/null the most obvious spam, and I can't recall the last false positive. It's happened, but extremely rarely. Google spam filter is not unique or magical.
And I never liked Gmail the client. It's not as godawful as Outlook, nothing even comes close, but it always gets in my way and does things in weird Googly ways. I'll stick with Kmail, thanks.
I dislike Dropbox for reasons that aren't technical, but the big thing for me is that I want either E2EE, or control/ownership of where my data is stored. These are my personal files (no, not that kind of personal), I'm not just going to scatter them on the internet.
My solution so far has been NextCloud, but I'm getting pretty fed up with it. But not enough to actually do anything about it... yet.
> I dislike Dropbox for reasons that aren't technical, but the big thing for me is that I want either E2EE, or control/ownership of where my data is stored.
You could run something like Cryptomator on top of Dropbox:
Boxcryptor used to be amazing for this till they got acquired by Dropbox. Last I checked cryptomator couple years ago it still hand random file corruption risk, is that still true?
I do agree with you at a philosophical level. I have worked in infosec long enough to know. I am pretty careful with what I upload. It’s just hard. Every little home hosted thing. They eat your time. Take effort. Even the “easiest” solutions have a real human cost if you are hosting it yourself.
My solution is… I have no fucks left to give about it. I haven’t for a long time. It works. My family will have all our photos and valuable sentimental data preserved. I keep a local backup. I spend my time on other stuff more valuable to me. If dropbox and backblaze disappear tomorrow oh well. If all my data is leaked? Knock yourself out. All the good stuff is in encrypted volumes.
My data has been breached 12 times by my count. /Twice/ by the OPM itself as I had a security clearance. DOGE goons have all our data and walked out with USB drives with all of it.
Equifax and credit agencies are a joke. My threat model is simple, nothing you can blackmail me with goes to the cloud. And that’s that. Breach me, try to hack my finances, try to steal my crypto. I have had my SIM transferred and someone unsuccessfully attacked my crypto accounts with it.
This is the first time I've heard someone say a smartphone reduces distractions.
As a millennial boomer, I prefer my triple monitor setup and mechanical keyboard, not to mention network- and client-level content blockers, whenever I have to input more than a sentence.
I was at a conference last week, and I took notes in a fullscreened GNU Nano. Distractions, ADHD, etc. Did get some odd looks, but I couldn't imagine taking notes without an actual keyboard. I'm not an ultra fast typer, but I'm decent - I'd challenge any thumb typer on MonkeyType.
I don't have any social apps or games on my phone. Other than the web browser there's nothing to distract me. I find it so easy to get caught up in checking the news or email or the episode of that show I was watching on my laptop, but I don't do any of those things habitually on my phone or tablet or reader so that's my "distraction free" device.
That's only for reading though! For taking notes I go with a real keyboard or pencil and paper whenever I have the choice.
similar here, I'm gradually removing more and more things from my phone. at this point it's mostly just a couple actually-important apps, a web browser, and messaging apps (because it's clearly superior to whipping out a laptop for brief things). "social" outside messaging is in the web browser or not on the phone at all. if I want to focus I just turn on Do Not Disturb for an hour.
browsing is slowly reducing as time goes on too, as while it's convenient on my phone, it's rarely efficient. it doesn't take long at all before I'd rather pull out a laptop and finish more quickly.
prefers-reduced-motion == 1 quiets that nonsense in a lot of cases, but many sites don't respect it. I wish this gratuitous animation fad would just die already. It adds nothing.
I hope it's a fad, but I'm not feeling good about it. I think the only real solution is something browser level that doesn't rely on developers/their management respecting it. (Or well, a new name that doesn't include "prefers" or "reduced"...)
I really don't understand why people want intentional lag added to everything.
Not only that, but for a time, Firefox seemed to be copying everything Chrome did, maybe as a way to stop the exodus of users. But people who wanted Chrome-y things were already using it, and people who didn't might as well, because Firefox was becoming indistinguishable from it.
God I wish Mozilla would be made great again. It's tragic how mismanaged it is.
Is it mismanaged? Sure, they spend a fair amount on administration. Sure, they spend about 10% on Mozilla Foundation stuff. But they still spend ~2/3 of revenue on software development.
And they're somewhat stuck between a rock and a hard place.
If they try to evolve their current platform, power users bitch. If they don't evolve their current platform, they lose casual users to ad-promoted alternatives (Chrome and Edge).
And they don't really have the money to do a parallel ground-up rewrite.
The most interesting thing I could see on the horizon is building a user-owned browsing agent (in the AI sense), but then they'd get tarred and feathered for chasing AI.
Part of Mozilla's problem is that the browser is already pretty figured out. After tabs and speed and ad blocking, there weren't any killer features.
To a first degree, nearly everyone who installed Chrome did so because of Google putting "Runs best in Chrome" on every page they own and including it with every single possible download, including things like Java updates!
Almost nobody chose Chrome. Microsoft had to change how defaults were managed because Chrome kept stealing defaults without even a prompt.
People use "the internet", they don't give a fuck about browsers. Firefox only got as high a usage as it did because of an entire decade of no competition, as Internet Explorer 6 sat still and degraded.
Chrome was installed as malware for tens of millions of people. It used identical processes as similar malware. It's insane to me how far out of their way lots of "Tech" people go to rewrite that actual history. I guess it shouldn't be surprising since about a thousand people here probably helped make those installer bundling deals and wrote the default browser hijacking code.
It should be a crime what Google did with Chrome. They dropped Chrome onto unsuspecting users who never even noticed when malware did the exact same thing with a skinned Chromium a couple days later. Microsoft was taken to court for far less.
How was Mozilla supposed to compete with millions of free advertising Google gave itself and literal default hijacking?
That site absolutely murders my CPU by... drawing vector graphics. This one displays basically the same info and is made by someone competent: https://www.nasa.gov/missions/artemis-ii/arow/
This is an entire Unity project that won't load due to however many content blockers I've got running on my phone. The incompetent one loads instantly, though it's admittedly laggy.
reply